items tagged with Rounding Third

There seems to be a pretty safe rule of thumb regarding the productions at Quad City Music Guild and the Richmond Hill and Playcrafters Barn theatres: When the actors appear to believe in their material (whether that material is strong or weak), the shows are terrific, and when they don't, they're not.

Of course, the people who are most essential to the success of area theatre are the ones ponying up the dough to get it produced (and this includes you, my ticket-buying friends). But it's hard to imagine the theatre year being as enjoyable as it was without the contributions of the following 12 individuals, each of whom added considerable flair to several area productions - oftentimes at several area venues - in 2006.

That Old Barn Magic: Moline’s Barn Theatre Presents Its First Musical in Nearly a DecadeWritten By: Mike SchulzSection: TheatreCategory: Feature Stories2006-05-10 08:36:35Over the past 10 months, the stage space at the Playcrafters Barn Theatre in Moline has been transformed into a ballpark (for the venue’s production of Rounding Third), an Italian villa (for Enchanted April), and the entire town of Bedford Falls (for It’s a Wonderful Life).

But these days, after climbing the stairs to the second level of the Barn, the first thing you notice about the set for Sweet & Hot: The Songs of Harold Arlen (running through May 21) is something more unexpected than anything found on those previous sets: a piano.

At roughly the halfway point of Richard Dresser’s two-man comedy Rounding Third – currently playing at the Playcrafters Barn Theatre – Michael (Jim Driscoll), a sweet-tempered assistant Little League coach, asks the team’s boisterous head coach, Don (Fred Harris Jr.), if they might enjoy a moment of silence; Michael and Don have shared a continual, often exasperated dialogue over several weeks of team play, and Michael wonders if perhaps quiet would be preferable to jabber. “Oh no,” says Don. “We don’t know each other well enough to not talk.”